Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Marine Painting in England

Nicholas Pocock

Ships and Seascapes

Life among the Pirates

Heroines and Harlots

Billy Ruffian

COCHRANE

The Real Master and Commander

DAVID CORDINGLY

BLOOMSBURY

For Bill Swainson

'He was tall and commanding in person, lively and winning in manner, prompt in counsel, and daring but cool in action. Endowed by nature both with strength of character and military genius, versed in naval science both by study and experience, and acquainted with seamen in every clime and country, nothing but an untimely restlessness of disposition, and a too strongly expressed contempt for mediocrity and conventional rules, prevented his becoming one of Britain's naval heroes.'

Description of Lord Cochrane in Greece at the age of fifty-two, by George Finlay

'Cool calculation would make it appear that the attempt to take Valdivia is madness. This is one reason why the Spaniards will hardly believe us in earnest, even when we commence; and you will see that a bold onset, and a little perseverance afterwards, will give a complete triumph; for operations unexpected by the enemy are, when well executed, almost certain to succeed, whatever may be the odds; and success will preserve the enterprise from the imputation of rashness.'

Lord Cochrane to Major Miller before the taking of the fortified naval base of Valdivia in Chile

'A British nobleman is a free man, capable of judging between right and wrong, and at liberty to adopt a country and a cause which aim at restoring the rights of oppressed human nature.'

Lord Cochrane to Don Joaquim de la Pezuela, the Spanish Viceroy of Peru

CONTENTS

Maps

Prologue

1 A Scottish Upbringing: 1775-1793

2 From Midshipman to Lieutenant: 1793-1800

3 Commander of the Speedy: 1800-1801

4 A Dark Interlude: 1801-1804

5 The Flying Pallas: 1804-1806

6 Member of Parliament for Honiton: 1806-1807

7 The Westminster Election: 1807

8 Return to the Mediterranean: 1807-1808

9 The Coastal Raids of the Imperieuse: 1808

10 The Defence of Fort Trinidad: 1808

11 Entering the Gates of Hell: 1809

12 The French Fleet Aground: 1809

13 The Court Martial of Lord Gambier: 1809

14 Riots and Romance: 1809-1814

15 The Stock Exchange Scandal: 1814

16 The Wilderness Years: 1814-1818

17 The Liberation of Chile and Peru: 1818-1822

18 Brazil and Beyond: 1822-1825

19 A Greek Fiasco: 1825-1828

20 The Fightback: 1828-1851

21 The Last Years: 1851-1860

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Appendix

Glossary

Bibliography

Notes

MAPS

Map of Scotland showing places connected with Cochrane's domestic life and the places he visited during his cruises in the Thetis and the Arab.

Map of the English Channel and Atlantic coast of France showing the ports, naval bases and anchorages associated with Cochrane's various cruises.

Map of the Mediterranean showing naval bases and anchorages as well as the harbours and coastal towns attacked by the Speedy and the Imperieuse.

A plan of the fireship attack on the French fleet anchored in Aix Roads on the evening of 11 April 1809. The time is around 9 p.m. The explosion vessels are approaching the floating boom and are followed by the fireships.

A plan of Aix Roads showing the British ships attacking the grounded French ships around 4 p.m. on 12 April 1809. Cochrane's Imperieuse has been joined by the bomb vessel Aetna, a brig sloop, three gun brigs, five frigates and two 74-gun ships.

A map of South America showing the places associated with Cochrane's cruises and naval campaigns.

Lord Cochrane as a civilian in his early forties before he departed for South America. Engraving published in 1819 after a picture by W. Walton.

PROLOGUE

Thomas Cochrane, the tenth Earl of Dundonald, was a man of outstanding courage and determination. He had a brilliant record as a frigate captain but he was also a fearless fighter for radical causes, a friend of the oppressed and a champion of liberty. When Lord Byron learnt of his arrival in the capital of Peru following the liberation of that country from the colonial rule of Spain he wrote, 'there is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane. His entry into Lima, which I see in today's paper, is one of the great events of the day.' Sir Walter Scott was so impressed by the standing ovation which Cochrane and his wife received in an Edinburgh theatre on their return from South America that he was inspired to write a poem in their honour. William Cobbett, the outspoken campaigner against corruption in public life, and Sir Francis Burdett, the leading spokesman for parliamentary reform, were among Cochrane's closest friends and supporters. When he died in 1860 The Times noted that he had outlived envy and malice, had suffered much, and triumphed at last. 'History can produce few examples of such a man or of such achievements. There have been greater heroes because there have been heroes with greater opportunities, but no soldier or sailor of modern times ever displayed a more extraordinary capacity than the man who now lies dead.'¹

In an age which saw the rise and fall of Napoleon and the upsurge in poetry, literature and painting of the Romantic movement, Cochrane was the very epitome of the Romantic hero. His life has an epic quality and was marked by a dramatic succession of ups and downs. Remarkable triumphs were all too often followed by disappointment and recriminations. Like so many heroes he was a flawed character with a temperament which led him into conflict and disputes. He imagined enemies where there were none and made enemies of people who should have been his friends. He was frequently out of step with his times and lacked the insight and the humility to understand why this should be and to adapt to it. His most damaging fault was his pursuit of money and his relentless determination to make his fortune. Many naval officers were motivated by the lure of prize money-the reward for the capture and subsequent sale of an enemy warship or merchant vessel. But with Cochrane it became an obsession. When he arrived in Chile he told his brother William, 'I have every prospect of making the largest fortune which has been made in our days, save that of the Duke of Wellington.'² There were good reasons for his mercenary attitude, as we shall see, but it was to cause trouble in his lifetime and in recent years has tarnished his once glittering reputation.

Cochrane's autobiographies have also been responsible for the conflicting views about him. The first of these appeared in 1859 and was entitled Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination. The second, which was simply called The Autobiography of a Seaman, was a racy account of Cochrane's career in the Royal Navy and was published shortly before his death in 1860. It was widely read at the time and has since become one of the classics of naval literature. Both biographies were compiled when Cochrane was in his eighties and were based on his memories of distant events as well as letters, logbooks, journals, newspaper cuttings and the memoirs of those who had known him. Neither book was written by Cochrane but by a professional author called George Butler Earp. Both contain vivid accounts of his naval actions but the South American volume is marred by the excessive amount of space devoted to arguments about pay and prize money, and The Autobiography of a Seaman is a platform for Cochrane's embittered views of the Basque Roads action, the court martial of Admiral Lord Gambier, and the Stock Exchange trial of 1814.

Cochrane used the biographies to settle old scores and it was not long before his attacks on leading figures of his day produced a backlash from their families and supporters. The first shots came from Lady Chatterton who published a biography of Gambier, commander-in-chief at the time of Cochrane's fireship attack on the anchored French fleet at Basque Roads. She strongly defended Gambier's actions and pointed out a number of errors in Cochrane's account.³ Far more damaging were two books which set out to defend Lord Ellenborough, the formidable judge who had presided over the Stock Exchange trial which had led to Cochrane's imprisonment and disgrace. The first book, by J. B. Atlay, an Oxford scholar and a barrister, was published in 1897 and was a meticulous examination of the background to the trial, the evidence presented and the arguments for the defence and the prosecution. Atlay not only set out a convincing case for the guilty verdict on Cochrane but was dismissive of the autobiography. 'No naval biography is more entertaining,' he wrote. 'Yet this popular book has been compiled in so extraordinary a manner as to have little claim to be considered anything more than a historical romance.'⁴ The second book, The Guilt of Lord Cochrane in 1814, which was written by Lord Ellenborough's grandson, underlined Atlay's verdict on the trial and concluded, 'The so-called Autobiography of a Seaman has been a fraud on the boyhood of England for over fifty years. It is not an autobiography, it was not even written by a seaman.'⁵

The doubts cast on Cochrane's character and on the reliability of the biographies did nothing to stem the interest in his life. The heroic and dramatic nature of so many of his exploits proved irresistible for later generations of biographers and were a source of rich material for historical novelists. Indeed, Cochrane's literary legacy has proved more significant than his historical legacy. He rarely receives more than a passing mention in most naval histories but his exploits live on in the works of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester and others. Captain Marryat, who had served as a midshipman in the frigate Imperieuse and had taken part in some of the most spectacular of Cochrane's actions, used his experiences as the basis for Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer, the first of his many adventure stories which proved popular with Victorian readers and were enjoyed by his friend Charles Dickens. G.A. Henty, a prolific writer whose patriotic tales were avidly read by schoolboys from Edwardian times until they fell out of favour in the 1950s, produced a stirring account of the naval hero in his book With Cochrane the Dauntless; the exploits of Lord Cochrane in South American waters which was first published in 1909. C.S. Forester drew on events in Cochrane's life for several of his Hornblower novels, notably The Happy Return, which is based on Cochrane's exploits with the Chilean navy. Patrick O'Brian freely acknowledged his debt to Cochrane's autobiography. The plots of three of the books in his admired sequence of novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon Stephen Maturin are taken directly from events in Cochrane's career: Master and Commander is inspired by Cochrane's exploits in the Speedy; The Reverse of the Medal has Aubrey involved in a scandal on the Stock Exchange; and Blue at the Mizzen includes incidents from Cochrane's actions in South America. Although there are similarities between Cochrane's life and some of the adventures of Hornblower and Aubrey, it has to be said that the real-life exploits of Cochrane were often far more daring and more exciting than those of his fictional counterparts.

There is no doubt that Cochrane was his own worst enemy. He had few equals as a man of action but he was lacking in tact and diplomacy. He was constantly upsetting his superior officers, dashing off provocative letters and imagining plots and slights against him. His greatest mistake was to get involved in the politics of his day. It was not unusual for serving naval officers to enter Parliament but Cochrane did not have the necessary qualities for success in that noisy bear garden. His passionate embracing of worthy but unpopular causes, his lack of any political subtlety, his impatience to get results, combined with his personal attacks and his intemperate language, proved a disastrous combination.

What is so striking about Cochrane is the contrast between the combative tone of so many of his letters and speeches and his unusually quiet and reserved manner. The novelist Mary Russell Mitford, who met him in the garden of William Cobbett's home in Hampshire when he was at the height of his fame as a frigate captain, was surprised to find him nothing like the common notion of a warrior: 'A gentle, mild young man was this burner of the French fleets and cutter-out of Spanish vessels . . .'⁶ Cyrus Redding, the writer and journalist, found him to be 'a remarkably plain, quiet, fine young man, wholly unassuming'.⁷ Maria Graham, the widow of a naval officer and a travel writer of distinction who saw much of Cochrane in Chile, also noted his unassuming manner but was impressed by the man behind the calm front which he presented to the world. 'Though not handsome, Lord Cochrane has an expression of countenance which induces you, when you have once looked, to look again and again. It is variable as the feelings which pass within; but the most general look is that of great benevolence. His conversation, when he breaks his habitual silence, is rich and varied; on subjects connected with his profession or his pursuits, clear and animated; and if ever I met with genius, I should say it was pre-eminent in Lord Cochrane.'⁸

This book began as a study of Cochrane's career in the Royal Navy with the aim of examining his version of the story as it appears in The Autobiography of a Seaman and comparing it with relevant contemporary documents. These documents include the logbooks and muster books of his ships; his letters and reports to his commanding officers and the Admiralty in London; the letters and memoirs of his fellow officers; court martial reports; the minutes of the Navy Board and Board of Admiralty; reports in the newspapers and in the Naval Chronicle; the observations of people who met him during his years as a frigate captain; charts and contemporary pictures of the ports, harbours and coasts which he visited; and the plans of his ships (curiously neglected by other biographers-we find, for instance, that the brig sloop Speedy was steered by a tiller and not by a wheel, and that the hated Arab bore little resemblance to a slab-sided collier).

It soon became evident that it was impossible to do justice to Cochrane's achievements as a naval commander without taking into account the truly astonishing feats which he carried out while in command of the navies of Chile and Brazil. It was equally difficult to ignore his activities as a Member of Parliament because these were originally prompted by his desire to draw attention to injustices, corruption and dangerous practices which he came across as a naval officer. His interest in the scientific and engineering advances of his day also had to be taken into account because he was constantly experimenting and inventing: he was among the first naval officers to make use of Congreve's rockets when attacking coastal targets; the 'explosion ships' at Basque Roads were largely of his own devising; he invented a convoy lamp for the use of merchant convoys; and he was a leading exponent of steam power for warships and devoted years of his life to devising and building a rotary steam engine.

In addition to the naval documents there is a great deal of material available on the other aspects of Cochrane's life. Because he was so often involved in controversial schemes, in legal battles and in claims for large sums of money including prize money and back pay, he and his secretary, and later his family, made sure that copies of his letters and parliamentary papers, and the records of his dealings with foreign governments were preserved. These, and much of the correspondence between him and his wife and their five children, have been deposited in the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland and are a wonderfully rich resource for students of his life. The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich has a number of relevant documents including the correspondence between Cochrane and his Scottish surgeon, James Guthrie. (It would be interesting to know whether Patrick O'Brian was aware of the life-long friendship between Cochrane and Guthrie when he created the ingenious and fascinating character of Dr Maturin.) And there is also valuable material in the British Library, notably the Collingwood Papers, the Auckland Papers and the Minutes of Evidence given before the House of Lords Committee of Privileges in 1861-the latter is particularly revealing about Cochrane's domestic life and the details of his courtship and runaway marriage to a young and pretty orphan in defiance of the wishes of his wealthy uncle.

We also know exactly what Cochrane looked like at different stages of his life. He sat for his portrait on several occasions and these paintings remain in the family collections. There are also some fine engraved portraits and a few caricatures by some of the leading cartoonists of his day. These, together with the descriptions of many people who met him, indicate that he was impressively tall and powerfully built, and that his hair was not red, as so many biographers have suggested, but auburn (the descriptions vary between sandy and reddish). He had blue eyes, a prominent nose and a fair complexion which his life at sea caused to be tanned and sun-freckled. Samuel Bamford, the radical activist, said that 'he stooped a little and had somewhat of a sailor's gait in walking'.⁹ And since he was born and brought up in Scotland it is not surprising to find that he spoke with a distinctive Scottish accent. His grandson recalled, 'I was a boy when my grandfather died, and I well remember him-his striking personality, his impressive manner of speech, with a lowland Scottish accent, and his kindness to children.'¹⁰ He was always intensely proud of his Scottish roots, and his Scottish friends and connections were a constant source of support during his long and turbulent life.

ONE

A Scottish Upbringing

1775-1793

Culross Abbey House, where Thomas Cochrane and his three younger brothers spent their early years, is situated beside the old abbey ruins on high ground overlooking the Firth of Forth. When the Cochrane family were living there the house had a palatial appearance with rooms on three floors and an imposing façade with square towers at either end. It had been built by Edward, Lord Bruce of Kinross, in 1607 and was based on designs by Inigo Jones. For more than two hundred years the house dominated the skyline of Culross, but in the nineteenth century the house fell into disrepair. It was partly dismantled in 1830 and was rebuilt on a smaller scale with two floors and without the flanking towers. The lower sections of the towers were converted into outbuildings and these, together with the heraldic pediment over the main entrance and the finely proportioned windows, are a reminder today of the house's former grandeur. From the terrace in front of the house there are panoramic views across the tidal waters of the Forth which stretch away into the distance towards the city of Edinburgh, fifteen miles downstream.

Alongside the house is the parish church of Culross. Once part of the old abbey, the church has been much altered over the years and the church tower now has battlements in place of the distinctive stepped roof which appears in old engravings. The churchyard is full of half-buried gravestones and ancient yew trees. It is a peaceful spot and in the summer months the only sounds are those from the sheep in the nearby fields and the cries of the jackdaws among the ruins of Culross Abbey. The abbey, which lies in the shadow of the church tower, was founded by Malcolm, Thane of Fife, in 1217 and for two centuries it was a monastery housing Cistercian monks. According to local legend Lady Macduff and her children were murdered by Macbeth in the vicinity.

Below the dilapidated walls and foundations of the abbey the land falls steeply away and a narrow road leads down to the cobbled streets of Culross which is a remarkably well-preserved example of a small Scottish town of the seventeenth century.¹ The picturesque collection of small houses with roofs of weathered red pantiles and Dutch gable ends extends along the waterfront. At the height of the town's prosperity in the 1600s there were sometimes as many as a hundred merchant ships anchored offshore waiting to transport locally-produced salt and coal from the Culross mines to Scandinavia and the Low Countries. There is little activity on this section of the river today; at low tide the foreshore becomes a vast expanse of mud with gulls and oystercatchers picking their way among the pools left by the receding water.

The Cochranes can be traced back to the eleventh century and beyond but it was William Cochrane, first earl of Dundonald, who founded the fortunes of the family. He was born in 1605 and became the Member of Parliament for Ayrshire in 1641. He was a great landowner with estates at Paisley and others in Renfrewshire and Ayrshire. His staunch support for the Stuart cause was rewarded by King Charles I who created him Baron Cochrane of Dundonald in 1647. He continued to represent Ayrshire in Cromwell's parliament of 1656 but in 1660 he was one of the lords who supported the return of Charles II to England and his restoration to the throne. In 1669 he was created earl of Dundonald and Lord Cochrane of Paisley and Ochiltree. He died in 1685, aged eighty, and was buried at Dundonald, some twenty miles south-west of Glasgow.² A fine portrait in the Dundonald family collection shows a man of commanding presence with the prominent nose and cleft chin characteristic of many of his descendants.

The family fortunes suffered a steady decline during the succeeding generations. Taxes, marriage provisions requiring handsome dowries for daughters, and large sums spent on improvements to houses and gardens, were a constant drain. Instead of making money from their lands, or investing in overseas colonies, many of the Cochranes joined the army-a noble enough profession but not a lucrative one. Three members of the family were killed in Marlborough's wars. The seventh earl joined the army of General Wolfe which was despatched to Canada to drive the French from Quebec and the settlements along the banks of the St Lawrence River. He died in 1758 during the assault on the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. Following his death the Paisley estates were sold and Major Thomas Cochrane, who became the eighth earl, inherited little more than the Culross Abbey estates and the surrounding lands. His unwise investments and extravagant bequests further diminished the family fortunes, which did not bode well for the man who would succeed him as the ninth earl of Dundonald. This was Archibald Cochrane, the father of Thomas Cochrane whose adventurous life would lead to him becoming the most famous member of the family.

Archibald Cochrane was a man with a genius for invention but a fatal inability to control his finances.³ He was born in 1748, the second child and eldest son of the nine children of Major Thomas Cochrane. At the age of sixteen he went into the army as a young officer in the 3rd Dragoons but after a while he left the army and joined the navy. His voyages took him as far as the Guinea coast and he rose to the rank of acting lieutenant but the long and dreary months at sea did not suit his active and enquiring mind. He returned to the family home at Culross to devote himself to civilian pursuits. In October 1774, at the age of twenty-six, he married Anna Gilchrist, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Captain James Gilchrist, a distinguished frigate captain. The Gilchrists lived at Annsfield, Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, a few miles south-east of Glasgow. There is a moving letter from Captain Gilchrist to his friend George Marsh, a commissioner in the Navy Office in London, which describes the feelings of his wife and himself at the thought of losing their daughter. It was written from Annsfield on 10 October 1774, a week before the marriage was due to take place:

Culross in the late seventeenth century, viewed across the Firth of Forth. Culross Abbey and the Abbey House can be seen on the hill above the town.

Dear George,

I wrote to you the week before last and intended to have mentioned an event that was likely to happen but Mrs Gilchrist's heart failed her. . . She is set down with tears in her eyes to tell you that we are in one sense to lose one of our dear girls in a few days and I really don't know what I shall do without her as she is truly a fine sweet girl yet can have no objections as I hope its for her good to be joined for life to so good and worthie a young man as Lord Cochrane who I look upon as none such in this deprived age being certainly possessed of every amiable quality and I flatter myself she is possessed of every disposition capable of making a man happy. Its my youngest daughter Annie who [by] way of addition to her goodness everybody reckons handsome . . . They are to be married here Monday next week [at] Culross Abbey which is his house near 40 miles from this.⁴

The marriage would be tragically cut short by Anna's death ten years later but while it lasted it seems to have been an extremely happy one. Archibald Cochrane worshipped his wife and described her as 'the handsomest woman in Scotland'. His brother John said, 'she was an angel of a woman. Her firmness and resolution never left her.'⁵

For the birth of her first child Anna left Culross and went to stay with her parents at Annsfield and it was there that Thomas Cochrane was born on 14 December 1775. He was in good company that year. Jane Austen was born two days later at her father's rectory in Hampshire; with two brothers in the navy she would take a keen interest in naval affairs, and the life of Captain Francis Austen would cross the path of the future Captain Lord Cochrane on more than one occasion. The year 1775 also saw the birth of Charles Lamb, the essayist, and J.M.W. Turner, England's greatest painter of landscapes and seascapes. The war with North America began that same year: a minor skirmish at Lexington in April 1775 lit a fuse which led to the full-scale Battle of Bunker Hill in June. The following year, on 4 July 1776, the United States of America formally declared their independence. The war would drag on for eight years and two of the young Thomas Cochrane's seven uncles took part in the campaign. His naval uncle Alexander was a junior lieutenant in the 74-gun ship Montague and was wounded in Rodney's action against the French off Martinique in April 1780. Colonel Charles Cochrane, the second son of the eighth earl, who was serving as an aide-de-camp of General Cornwallis, was killed during the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the autumn of 1781. The siege ended with Cornwallis surrendering his army to General Washington, an event which effectively marked the end of Britain's struggle to retain her American colonies.

The Cochrane family at Culross were kept informed of events in North America by occasional letters from Alexander Cochrane to his eldest brother Archibald who was now head of the family.⁶ The eighth earl had died on 27 June 1778 and Archibald, at the age of thirty, had inherited the title and the house and estates of Culross Abbey. His eldest son Thomas, who was three years old when his father became Lord Dundonald, now assumed the courtesy title of Lord Cochrane.

Given the mass of material preserved in the Dundonald family archives it is disappointing to find that so little has been recorded of the childhood of Thomas Cochrane and his younger brothers Basil, William and Archibald. However, it is evident from Cochrane's autobiography that they had little or no formal schooling. The parlous state of the family finances discouraged Lord Dundonald from sending the four boys to any of the fine schools in Edinburgh, and he seems to have been too busy with his own projects to have paid much attention to the matter. 'Perceiving our education imperilled,' Cochrane recalled, 'the devotedness of my maternal grandmother, Mrs Gilchrist, prompted her to apply her small income to the exigencies of her grandchildren.'⁷ Thanks to her efforts the boys received the rudiments of schooling from a series of tutors, none of whom appears to have been very satisfactory. It was an upbringing that taught them to be self-reliant and practical. They had the run of the rambling great house at Culross, the churchyard and the abbey ruins, and the thick forest of Scots pines which covered the slopes to the east. According to family tradition Cochrane was an adventurous boy and there are tales of him climbing trees, descending a disused coal shaft to look for a nest and sailing a boat on the Forth with bed sheets for sails.

On 15 November 1784, when Cochrane was nearly nine, his mother died in the house of his uncle John with her husband by her side. Lord Dundonald was overcome with grief: 'Life itself is a misery to me since my Dearest, Dear, Dear Annie breathed her last in my arms,' he wrote in a letter to her mother. 'Her last words to me were Take care of the bairns, Farewell, Farewell. Her dying look will never be effaced from my mind, recommending herself to God.'⁸ We can only speculate on the effect which her death had on her children because there are scarcely any references to her in their later correspondence. Fortunately for the young family their grandmother, Mrs Gilchrist, stepped into the breach and took charge of the household at Culross. She seems to have been a warm and capable woman. Many years later Cochrane's wife would testify that he often referred to the days of his youth in Scotland and 'the happy days with his grandmother'.⁹

The south front of Culross Abbey House as it looked in the 1780s during the boyhood of Thomas Cochrane. The tower of the Abbey church can be seen on the left.

It is significant that most of the brief chapter which Cochrane devoted to his boyhood in his autobiography is devoted not to his own upbringing but to his father and his scientific experiments. He admired his father, he learnt much from him and later in life he would prove equally inventive, but he could not forgive him for embarking on one ruinous venture after another: '. . . his discoveries, now of national utility, ruined him, and deprived his posterity of their remaining paternal inheritance.'¹⁰ While Thomas Cochrane was still in his teens the entire Culross Abbey estate was put up for sale and later passed out of the family for ever.¹¹ The irony of the situation was that if the estates had been well managed they would have brought considerable wealth to Dundonald and his heirs. Beneath the 2,000 acres of land lay rich seams of coal, iron, fire clay and brick clay; above ground the estate included nearly 1,000 acres of Scots pine 'now fit to be cut for waggon-way rails, sleepers and pit-timber'.¹² This was at a time when the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum and such raw materials were very much in demand.

Lord Dundonald was aware of the riches on his land. He was abreast of the latest developments of the industrial age and was in touch with some of the best scientific minds of the day: Joseph Black, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh and a man often regarded as the father of modern chemistry, was a family friend; and so was Matthew Boulton, the partner of James Watt, the Scottish designer of the first commercial steam engine. But Dundonald believed he had made a discovery which would yield riches far greater than any profits to be made from selling timber or extracting iron or fire clay from the Culross estates. He had carried out experiments by heating coal in a kiln and found that this produced a number of useful by-products including coke, ammonia and coal tar. The coke could be sold to the newly established iron works in the region, and the ammonia could be sold to calico printers, but it was the coal tar which he believed to be the most promising. He was aware from his time in the navy of the damage caused to the bottoms of ships by the teredo worm, particularly in tropical waters. He believed that coal tar could be used as an effective anti-fouling and protection against the teredo worm. The navy already used great quantities of Stockholm tar for a variety of purposes: for coating the standing rigging of ships and for sealing the seams of planks after they had been caulked with oakum; and tar diluted with oil was painted on to the topsides of ships as a preservative varnish. But Stockholm tar had to be imported from Scandinavia (it mostly came from the pine forests of Finland and was exported via Stockholm). It was expensive and in times of war there was always a possibility that the supply might be cut off. There were obvious advantages in producing tar from British coal, and if British ships adopted it as a form of underwater anti-fouling, it would be needed in vast quantities.

Dundonald took out a patent for his particular method of extracting coal tar and by 1783 he had established four kilns at Culross which were processing some twenty-eight tons of coal a week. In 1785 he published a paper entitled Account of the Qualities and Uses of Coal Tar and Coal Varnish and he decided to expand production by setting up the British Tar Company. Among his partners in this venture was his cousin John Loudon Macadam who, many years later, would become famous as the pioneer of road building-his name for ever associated with 'tarmacadam', or tarmac. Initially the tar-making venture went well and among the admirers of the process were a number of eminent Scots including Professor Black and Adam Smith, the economist. This support prompted Dundonald to set about raising large sums of money to establish kilns at Newcastle and elsewhere. He wrote to his uncle Andrew Cochrane, 'We are encouraged to proceed in establishing the manufacture upon a very large scale in different parts of Great Britain . . . but a capital of thirty to forty thousand pounds will in the course of a few years need to be expended.'¹³ He succeeded in raising £22,400 based on the assumption that there would be a clear annual profit of £5,000.¹⁴

A later generation would recognise the advantages of having a home-grown source of tar but, as is so often the case with inventors, Dundonald was not the one to profit from his new process. He had assumed that the Admiralty would welcome his discovery but the navy had been experimenting with copper sheathing to protect the bottoms of ships. The experiments had proved so successful that between 1779 and 1783 the Admiralty issued orders which resulted in the entire fleet being coppered. It was an expensive and labour-intensive process and had some serious drawbacks, but the Admiralty was committed to coppering and was not interested in Dundonald's cheaper alternative. His efforts to persuade the builders of merchant ships to use tar were similarly rebuffed. Cochrane accompanied his father on some of his visits to London and recalled a visit to a shipbuilder in Limehouse. 'My lord,' said the shipbuilder, 'we live by repairing ships as well as by building them, and the worm is our best friend.'¹⁵ Dundonald received a similar response from shipbuilders in the provinces.

Discouraged by his failure to win over the Admiralty, as well as the merchant shipbuilders, Dundonald lost interest in his coal-tar project and began to experiment with the manufacture of salt and sal ammonica. His friend Professor Black paid a visit to him at Culross and warned him against embarking on other projects. 'I endeavoured to dissuade him from the pursuit of these for the present, and advised him to attend to the branches of his manufacture which had already succeeded and were bringing in money.'¹⁶ Dundonald did not heed the warning and continued with his experiments.

His financial situation had been slightly improved by his second marriage. In April 1788, at the age of forty, he married Isabella Raymond, a wealthy widow. Thomas Gainsborough painted her portrait and an engraving based on the picture reveals a good-looking woman with fine features and an abundance of dark hair. Thomas Cochrane was twelve at the time of the marriage and he was now despatched to London with his brother Basil. Their father was determined that they should both join the army and for several months they attended Mr Chauvet's military academy in Kensington Square. Lord Dundonald's agent provides us with a glimpse of their appearance as they set off for London: 'I have just seen the young gentlemen off by the coach. It is true they have not had very much education, but they are strong and fine to look at and very sensible, and will get on anywhere.'¹⁷ Another source described Thomas around this time as 'a tall thin youth with locks somewhat tending to an auburn tinge'.¹⁸ There is a portrait of him as a boy of around twelve or thirteen in the Dundonald family collection. He looks intelligent and thoughtful and is shown with long, reddish-brown hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion.

After the years of roaming wild in the vicinity of Culross Abbey it must have been difficult to adjust to the schooling and the surroundings of central London. The military academy provided him, albeit briefly, with the foundations of an education which he would later build on but he was already clear that an army career was not for him. He wanted to follow the examples of his uncle Alexander and his grandfather Captain Gilchrist and join the navy. His father, who had not enjoyed his time at sea, ignored his wishes and procured him a commission in the 104th Regiment of Foot. Thomas never took up the commission. He did not like the military training, he hated the military uniform he was compelled to wear, and he returned to Scotland, telling his father that he wanted to go to sea with his uncle. His father was furious and remained adamant that a military career was the only option. There now occurred a curious hiatus in the young Cochrane's life. 'Four years and a half were now wasted without further attempt to secure for us any regular training.'¹⁹ At an age when boys destined to be naval officers were at sea learning the ropes, Cochrane embarked on a course of self-tuition at home. 'Knowing that my future career depended on my own efforts, and more than ever determined not to take up my military commission, I worked assiduously at the meagre elements of knowledge within my reach.'²⁰ Exactly what form this self-education took is not known but presumably he studied any books to hand that would help him in his longed-for naval career. It was during this period that the threat of financial ruin looming over the family became a reality.

His father continued with his experiments, turning from one project to another. He set up a factory to produce alum or alumina for silk and calico printers, and discovered a method of producing a form of gum which could replace imported gum senegal. He accidentally discovered that coal gas could be used for illumination but he never followed this up and it was left to others to make their fortunes from gas lighting. He took out several more patents, and published a paper entitled The Present State of the Manufacture of Salt Explained. In 1790 he joined the Losh brothers to produce synthetic soda from salt and together they set up a works near Newcastle where Dundonald had already established a tar distillery. Within a few years the partnership was dissolved and the Losh brothers went on to develop a profitable chemical business on their own. Dundonald had borrowed heavily to finance his various projects and the moment came when his creditors lost patience with him. In 1793 he was forced to put the Culross estate up for sale. He wrote and published a detailed description of the assets of the estate which ran to seventy-five pages. He recorded the history of the estate, stressed the value of its mineral deposits and pine forests, and sadly admitted that 'nothing but the Proprietor's pecuniary inability to proceed farther, could make him wish to part with such a property, on which he had expended so much money to render productive, and struggled so hard to retain'.²¹

The year 1793 would prove to be a critical one in the life of his son Thomas. It was the year in which he was faced with the imminent loss of his inheritance and realised that he would have to make his own way in the world. It was the year in which France, having executed its king, declared war on Britain and thus initiated a conflict which would last for twenty-one years and provide the opportunity for several generations of naval officers to make their names and their fortunes. And it was the year in which his father at last consented to him joining the navy. His army commission was cancelled and in the summer of 1793, at the unusually late age of seventeen, he set off from Culross to join the crew of his uncle's ship at Sheerness.

Cochrane's naval uncle, who played such an important role in his life, was a relatively junior frigate captain in 1793 but he would end his days with a knighthood and the rank of Admiral of the White.²² In many ways his naval career was more distinguished than that of his nephew who did not command a British ship of the line, let alone a squadron or a fleet, until he was an old man and then during a period of peace. The Hon. Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane was the sixth son of the eighth Earl of Dundonald and had joined the navy at the age of fifteen. As a midshipman and lieutenant he saw a great deal of action on the coast of North America and in the West Indies where he served under Sir Peter Parker and Sir George Rodney. Promoted to post-captain in 1782, he had a successful spell as a frigate captain before making his reputation in 1801 when he superintended the successful landing of General Abercromby's army on the coast of Egypt. By 1804 he was